In 1914 the great American poet Robinson Jeffers and his wife Una visited the Carmel-Big Sur coast south of California's Monterey Peninsula and were overwhelmed by its wild and pristine beauty. They decided to build a house there — Tor House — on a craggy finger of land called Carmel Point. They used granite stones and rocks gathered locally from the shoreline of Carmel Bay. After the house was finished, Jeffers continued to build, constructing his rugged Hawk Tower: a poetic retreat which inevitably brings to mind other literary towers — the towers of Hölderlin, Rilke and Yeats, for instance.

It's evident that Jeffers was a practical man, and a scientific one too. He'd studied medicine and forestry and astronomy and evolutionary science. But he was also well-versed in literature, languages, religion and the Classics. Truly Renaissance in his education. Ah, where have those times gone?

Sign-Post

Civilized, crying: how to be human again; this will tell you how.Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity,Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow,Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinityMake your veins cold; look at the silent stars, let your eyesClimb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes;Things are the God; you will love God and not in vain,For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. At lengthYou will look back along the star's rays and see that evenThe poor doll humanity has a place under heaven.Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strengthAnd sickness; but now you are free, even to be human,But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman.

As a poet, Jeffers evoked the divine in nature, and was one of our very first poet-ecologists. He realised that, if we pollute our environment, we pollute ourselves — our own minds and spirits. He denounced the arrogant, destructive tendency of human beings, and lamented the self-created split between mankind and the natural world.

Natural Music

The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,(Winter has given them gold for silverTo stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)From different throats intone one language.So I believe if we were strong enough to listen withoutDivisions of desire and terrorTo the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities,Those voices also would be foundClean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances aloneBy the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.

Jeffers recognised the humbling truth that we are just part of the universe, not the centre of it; and that our high-minded ideas amount to very little in the face of raw nature and its extraordinary power and beauty.

The Beauty of Things

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things — earth, stone and water,Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars —The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,And unhuman nature its towering reality —For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rockAnd water and sky are constant — to feelGreatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the naturalBeauty, is the sole business of poetry.The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

11 comments:

This is a terrific post, Robert. It's been a while since I've read any Robinson Jeffers poems, but the ones you quote are wonderful. Oh how we need more poets, more ecologists, more poet-ecologists like Jeffers.

This poem also resonates with me on a personal level, because the name of my great-grandmother—who died before I was born, yet, strangely, has a kind of mystical presence in my life—was Una.

Friko — I wouldn't call him a misanthrope, but he did not like our grasping, spiritually deprived human culture. He thought we must look beyond humanity in order to become truly human, reestablish our relationship with nature or suffer the consequences. Note that later on in the poem he says that '... even / The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven.' We can be human if we accept a more responsible, less arrogant, more integrated role in the universe, and just 'be' — like the rock, the air and the stars.

Thank you for this, Solitary Walker. From my memories of walking where Robinson Jeffers walked, I can still hear:

"The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers ..."

The image at the top of my blog was taken of the coast hills and sky south of Carmel, in Big Sur, from the 2-mile dirt road that leads to the New Camaldoli Hermitage. That was in October 2008, when I was on my way to visit Tor House and Hawk tower. Robinson Jeffers and the central and northern coast of California have been an inspiration since I was a young woman.

I am quite drawn to the poets of the Pacific Northwest. These poems are wonderful in their irony. I don't know if you are familiar with William Everson (aka Brother Antoninus), but he followed Jeffers, after "Jeffers showed me God" in his words. "It was an intellectual awakening and a religious conversion in one." I think you would like Everson. If you don't remember my post on him a couple of winters ago, it's here (you liked what I shared about him at the time):

Are you aware of Peter Thabit Jones' new collection, 'Poems from a Cabin on Big Sur' about his time as a writer-in-residence in the cabin? Published by Cross-Cultural Communications, New York, in May 2011. The poems are accompanied by a selection of photos and an introduction by New York's Vince Clemente, a poet, critic, and Emeritus Professor of Poetry.We attended the launch in Swansea.

This one really interested me. Semi recent,America,California dreaming. Did a little research. Blew me away.I found a poem,Rock and Hawk and I thought of Merline..... "A falcon has perched...to hang in the future sky.. bright power,dark peace...Future consciousness.." Of course he had his Una....Thank you SW

ARAGÓN VALLEY

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It is solved by walking. ST AUGUSTINE

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We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. SIR THOMAS BROWNE

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In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. ALBERT CAMUS

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Ain't talkin', just walkin'. BOB DYLAN

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SAINT-PRIVAT D'ALLIER

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It is not down in any map; true places never are. HERMAN MELVILLE

ELIXIR OF LIFE

We should be low and lovelike and lean each man to the other / And patient as pilgrims, for pilgrims are we all. WILLIAM LANGLAND

THE CAT WHO WALKS BY HIMSELF

This may be one of the under appreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused. REBECCA SOLNIT

TOP CAT, TOP HAT

We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wild can still return us to ourselves. ROBERT MACFARLANE

LAKE DISTRICT

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GLASTONBURY

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SOURCE OF THE LOUE

Discover the world in which you already live. WALTER BENJAMIN

CLOCHER COMTOIS

My monastery is the world. HARRY MULISCH

WATER LILY

It has been a savage enough pilgrimage... I feel a stranger everywhere and nowhere... Rip the veil of the old vision across, and walk through the rent. DH LAWRENCE

Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood / Let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood / Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves / Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace / Let me die in my footsteps / Before I go down under the ground.BOB DYLAN

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The one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth. LEO TOLSTOY

There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life / There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine / O traveller, if you are in search of That / Don't look outside, look inside yourself and seek That. RUMI